Katherine Snyder

My first book, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850-1925 (Cambridge UP, 1999), considered the rise of British and American modernist narrative in relation to the history of masculinity. Over the past several years, I have turned in my research and teaching to contemporary fiction, with a particular interest in post-apocalyptic, post-traumatic, and post-9/11 novels.

My current book project, Novel Traces: Rewriting the Past in the Post-9/11 Present, identifies a hitherto unrecognized cluster of post-9/11 novels that extensively rewrite canonical works of literature from various historical moments. While some of these post-9/11 novels explicitly allude to their significant literary precursors, others rework their predecessor texts more obliquely. Whether patent or latent, these contemporary acts of fictional revision contribute to our understanding of the continuing post-9/11 moment while reshaping the present meanings of our literary and historical past.

Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850-1925
Katherine Snyder's study explores the significance of the bachelor narrator, a prevalent but little recognized figure in premodernist and modernist fiction by male authors, including Hawthorne, James, Conrad, Ford, and Fitzgerald. Snyder demonstrates that bachelors functioned in cultural and literary discourse as threshold figures who, by crossing the shifting, permeable boundaries of bourg....

My current book project, Novel Traces: Rewriting the Past in the Post-9/11 Present, identifies a hitherto unrecognized cluster of post-9/11 novels that extensively rewrite canonical works of literature from various historical moments. While some of these post-9/11 novels explicitly allude to their significant literary precursors, others rework their predecessor texts more obliquely. Whether patent or latent, these contemporary acts of fictional revision contribute to our understanding of the continuing post-9/11 moment while reshaping the present meanings of our literary and historical past.